A popular hit at our Festival when first shown in 1999, Left Luggage is a powerful adaptation of Carl Friedman's autobiographical novel, The Shovel and the Loom, by actor-turned-director Jeroen Krabbé. Set in Antwerp in 1972, the film follows a free-spirited and liberated young Jewish student, Chayah, who, completely secularized and oblivious to her parents' experiences during the Holocaust, takes a job out of necessity as the nanny to the five children of an ultra-Orthodox family. Initially flabbergasted by the strictness of the parents and the religious rituals instilled into their offspring, she comes to a different understanding of her own Jewish identity, through her relationship with one of the children, the mischievous four year-old Simchah. With a cast list that reads like a Who's Who of Europe's finest actors including Maximilian Schell, Isabella Rossellini, Chaim Topol, Marianne Sägebrecht and Jeroen Krabbé himself as Simchah's father, Left Luggage builds up to an unexpected climax.